Thank You, Jovian Vortex Hunters! The Hunt Is Over…for Now.

We did it! The Jovian Vortex Hunter project, launched on Zooniverse in June 2022, is out of data as of December 23, 2023. 

Over 6,000 registered volunteers joined the project to view images from NASA’s JunoCam instrument of the swirling clouds in Jupiter’s atmosphere and draw on them using a computer mouse. Together, they contributed over a million marked-up images indicating exciting features such as vortices, where winds move in circular patterns. If you’re one of these volunteers, thank you! 

The newly marked-up data from the Jovian Vortex Hunters project revealed more than 7,000 vortexes, a much bigger collection than earlier studies contained. The hard work of our volunteers resulted in trends nobody had seen before! For example, the new data shows that white and dark ovals are more prominent in the higher latitudes, while the brown vortices are in the mid-latitudes.

Want to see those trends (and others) for yourself? Read the Jovian Vortex Hunters Blog! And stay tuned… The science team is hard at work analyzing the data and writing up papers on the results. They hope to launch another round of the Jovian Vortex Hunters project soon.